Alice Through the Looking Glass

You certainly get your 20 bucks worth of spectacle out of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” So breathtaking are the landscapes, so whimsical are the creatures, so marvelous are the marvels that I wanted to give a standing ovation to whoever signed the check to pay for all this. Expensiver and expensiver!

Just an eye-blink ago this film’s director, James Bobin, was making “Flight of the Conchords” for HBO before moving on to the distinctly non-gargantuan movie “The Muppets,” but “Looking Glass” redefines digital sumptuousness. At no point did I care about anything that was happening (only in the last five minutes does Bobin get around to trying to create some meaningful relationships amid the clatter), but seeking emotional resonance at a blockbuster fantasy movie is starting to seem a little eccentric, like asking to see the wine list at Denny’s.

After a prologue in which Alice is a brave sea captain (an early signal that the movie’s resemblance to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” sequel ends with its title), we go back to Wonderland to find a severely depressed Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), who has been rendered miserable because he’s thinking about his family’s long-ago death via an attack by the dragon-like Jabberwock.

It’s a thin peg upon which to hang the sequel to 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland,” but off we go, as Alice (Mia Wasikowska) confronts Time (Sacha Baron Cohen, this time doing a Werner Herzog accent), an unyielding Prussian despot who, in ending a life, announces, “Time’s up.” Then he takes a pocket watch with a person’s name inscribed on it and hangs it in a dank, funereal void.

Thanks to a Jules Verne-ish gadget called a chronosphere, Alice sails across the oceans of time hoping to turn back the clock to save the Sad Hatter’s family from annihilation. Instead she discovers secrets about the long-standing feud between the sisters the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). The latter, it turns out, got her swollen head when she bumped it on concrete. Oh. Also there is a megadispute over some crumbs spilled under the bed when the two were princesses.

So the screenplay (by Linda Woolverton) isn’t exactly heaving with brilliant ideas, but it works well enough as a blank canvas against which the special-effects team goes bonkers. Time’s realm is mystical and scary, the Hatter’s chapeau-shaped abode is nutty enough to be approved by Willy Wonka, and strangely endearing little beasties are everywhere. The scene in which everybody turns to stone is magnificent, even if it turns out to be yet another bogus gimmick. (I thought the whole “turned to stone” thing was supposed to be kind of immutable.)

As an adventure, everything comes a bit too easily to Alice, and the film’s message — girls can do anything! — is bland. Rarely (as when the script rhymes “dafter” and “laughter”) does it even hint at Carroll’s pleasing whimsy. If it’s dry wit you’re after, you probably shouldn’t be at the multiplex in the first place.